SREBRENICA(Bosnia-Hercegovina): Mevludin Oric, one of a handful of Muslim men who survived the 1995 mass executions in Srebrenica, believes he received the gift of life so he could testify about the horrors he had seen.

“I was saved by God ... spared to bear witness to genocide,” Oric says.

He was 25 when the eastern Bosnian town fell to Serb forces on July 11 1995. He was captured while trying to escape to safety through Serb-held forests and taken to a school gym in the nearby village of Grbavci where some 2,500 Muslims had already been imprisoned.

“We were there until (Bosnian Serb general Ratko) Mladic arrived. He looked around, talked to the guards and laughed. As he left we were ordered to crawl to the exit,” Oric remembers.

Outside, prisoners were packed on to trucks after their hands had been bound and eyes covered. Oric and his nephew Haris were on the same truck.

“They took us to a field. Haris asked me if they were going to kill us and just as I said ‘no’ a machine gun started.”

Oric tells his story with occasional pauses in the middle of sentence to sigh.

He threw himself on the ground, unhurt. Hit by a bullet, his nephew fell on top of him and died.

Oric spent the whole day lying under Haris’s body, listening to the sounds of buses bringing men to execution, machine gun fire and screams of pain. At one point, Serbian soldiers began shooting dead and half-dead men through the head, but Oric was again spared.

As night fell Oric heard Serb soldiers talking about “taking some rest.” Despite being afraid that they could still be nearby he got up from under his nephew’s body, took the blindfold off and screamed at the sight.

“The field was covered by thousands of bodies, blood was everywhere, I had to step on the dead,” Oric remembers.

A man responded to Oric’s cry. It was Hurem Suljic, another survivor of the executions. Smail Hodzic also survived but he was to meet up with Oric and Suljic only a few days later as they walked through forests, avoiding Serb soldiers.

The three men were shot at on several occasions during their 10 day journey to safety.

When Oric and others reached Muslim-held territory they were completely exhausted.

“I fell to the ground and started crying,” Oric recounts.

He now lives in Ilijas, near Sarajevo, with his wife and four children.

Two of his daughters were born in war-time Srebrenica. They and their mother had been among thousands of women and children packed on to buses and sent out of Srebrenica following the enclave’s fall.

Oric is unemployed and his family lives on child support of little over 60 euros (70 dollars) a month.

He hopes for the day when Mladic will be brought to justice and has already appeared as a witness in the UN war crimes court trials of former Bosnian Serb commanders Vidoje Blagojevic and Dragan Jokic, sentenced to 18 and 9 years in prison respectively for their role in the Srebrenica massacre.

The massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica was the only episode of Bosnia’s bloody 1992-95 war that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague has ruled was a genocide.

While Oric and his group are the only men known to have survived the mass executions in Srebrenica, some local men found their way to safety by walking through forests in constant danger of running into Serb soldiers.

Hundreds were killed as they sought to escape, since the exhausted men were under almost constant machine gun and artillery fire.

Serif Begic, 20 at the time, was among the men who fled to the forests accompanied by his father and brother.

“They didn’t make it,” Begic, a frail man who returned to Srebrenica three years ago, mutters.

Begic’s survival is a cause of wonder in itself. He walked through forests for eight days with his arm and leg injured.

“We ate a mixture of ash tree bark with water,” he remembers.

Srebrenica remains a testament to the Serbs’ wartime ethnic cleansing, as the majority of its 28,000 Muslim pre-war inhabitants still live elsewhere, but Begic said he had to return.

“Srebrenica is where the best and the worst moments of my life have taken place, I could not live anywhere else,” he said.

Now Begic spends his days guarding the dead at the memorial cemetery in Potocari, just outside Srebrenica.

From his post Begic looks at a hall — its walls covered in offensive graffiti — where Muslim victims who failed to escape were imprisoned by the Serbs before execution.—AFP